- Peekay is ready to graduate from school, and he's brought the boxing program up to winning the championship. He even gets a featherweight title for himself.
- The problem is that now he's got to head off to college, and needs to figure out a way to pay for it. Peekay is starting to feel like he's got no control over his life, and that all the people who love him really make his decisions for him. Everyone in town is certain that he'll get the Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, but he doesn't make it.
- Morrie offers to pay for his tuition at Oxford, but Peekay is too proud and independent to take the money. He gets offers for a few scholarships at South African schools, but Oxford is his dream.
- Peekay decides to go out to the crystal cave to try to commune with Doc and figure out what he should do. He meditates on the cliff, thinking of the waterfalls that Inkosi-Inkosikazi showed him so many years ago, and when he opens his eyes, he sees a black mamba, the deadliest snake in the world, swaying near his face.
- The snake slithers across Peekay's boot and down the cliff. He follows its tracks and sees that it went into and out of the cave, and takes it as a sign from Doc.
- Peekay decides to take a year off between school and university, and heads up to Northern Rhodesia to work in the copper mines to make enough money to pay for school.
- The work is extremely dangerous, which is why it pays so well, and Peekay aces the school of mines to become a grizzly man. The grizzly man is the one who has to blow up the huge chunks of rock so that they are small enough to go down the chute to the trucks waiting below. It is one of the deadliest jobs in the mine.
- Because of mine superstition, the man who works above the grizzly man drilling the ore never meets his grizzly man. If he has a good grizzly man, like Peekay, he'll send him a case of brandy at the end of every month.
- Peekay doesn't drink, because he's trying to use the heavy physical labor to bulk up and be in shape for the welterweight boxing class, so he always gives his brandy to his only friend at the mine, a Georgian named Rasputin who doesn't speak much English.
- Once Rasputin saved Peekay from a possible gang rape by drunken miners starved for women in their mine camp, and they have been friends ever since. Every day Rasputin carves a perfectly round sphere out of wood using a heavy axe, and Peekay takes up the practice too to strengthen his arms.
- Peekay does his three months as a grizzly man, when mine regulations state that he must take a month off before coming back to the grueling work. However, after only a week's rest, the mine captain asks him to come back because he's the best and Botha, his driller, misses him. They'll double his bonus, so he accepts.
- Botha starts sending two cases of brandy every month, so Rasputin decides to make Peekay a Russian rabbit stew in return for the extra booze. After they eat the delicious meal Rasputin confesses that he actually shot a cat and not a rabbit. Yum!